New practices of land-sea coordination in coastal zone ecological security integration: A case study of Nantong

Coastal development strategies and land-sea coordination has made a close connection between the sea and the land, and the coastal zone has become a whole entity. In this study, we established the ecological security integration pattern (ESIP) of the coastal zone in Nantong based on the land-sea coordination and connectivity. We selected the main coastal zone ecosystem service (ES) evaluation indices, calculated the ecological risk to validate the ES evaluation results, and explored the mechanisms driving ESs using multiscale geographically weighted regression. Ecological sources relies on rivers, tidal flats, and areas with high ES to construct an ecological corridor from land to sea. Ecological risk had a significant negative correlation with ES. The six driving factors selected had a positive and negative influence on the ecological sources equal to ES; An ESIP of two belts, two channels, and one river network was constructed across the land and sea boundaries, and the effect of driving factors on ES was integrated to provide suggestions for the future ESIP. This study of an ESIP evaluation system in Nantong reflects the new practice of land-sea coordination, which not only enriches the ecological security evaluation system, but also provides novel ideas for realizing ecological protection and restoration in coastal zones.